Iron Man Hands-On

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Heavy boots of lead... Fills his victims full of dread.

By Hilary Goldstein

Tony Stark has a lot of problems. The formerly selfish and self-obsessed business tycoon recently decided to become a superhero, he's got issues with the many women he's dating, and someone is trying to steal his advanced technology to shift the balance of power in the world. Oh, and he's starring in a videogame based on both a movie and comic-book property. Talk about the kiss of death! Good news is that SEGA's Iron Man looks likely to buck the trend of bad movie-licensed games and deliver a promising action title.

You play as Iron Man throughout. You won't be running around as Tony Stark making business deals. You're in the suit and the suit is awesome. The trick with making a game about Iron Man is that he has to be able to fight on the ground, hover in the air and fly at the speed of sound. Developer Secret Level managed to merge all three of these elements seamlessly.

Hovering is handled with the left trigger. Hold it down and you ascend; give a half-squeeze and you hover. Though you are hovering, you can move forward and even evade incoming attacks with the dodge button. You just won't move quickly, but that's often helpful in combat. Flight is mapped to the left shoulder button. And if you want to walk on the ground, well, just hit the asphalt and move forward. The transition between the three modes of movement is fluid and only disorienting for the first few minutes of gameplay. Once you get the hang of it, Iron Man becomes quite a unique experience -- at least in terms of movement.

The levels we played were smartly designed to give reason to switch between all three modes of movement. In one level, as Iron Man attacks a compound attempting to swipe Stark Industries' latest tech, you're attacked by several jets. You'll need to fly after the jets, either shooting with repulsor blasts while in flight or holding down the afterburner button to give a serious boost to your acceleration. You can't attack while using your afterburners, but you certainly can catch up to a speeding plane. Then it's a matter of hovering for a moment, locking on with your missiles and taking down the jet. Or, if you prefer, hit the grapple button as the jet passes and sling it towards the ground.

At the same time tanks are bombarding you from below. You can hover and lay waste to them from the air or drop to the ground and go mano-y-tank. A few punches should do the trick. Or you can grab hold of the tank, rapidly tap the grapple button, and toss the tank against the hillside. While mission objectives are fairly standard (destroy this, blow up that), the levels are very open, giving you choices on how you approach your tasks.

Iron Man is not like Spider-Man or the Hulk. He doesn't have any true powers. It's just a rich dude in a very expensive suit. And that suit uses energy. Fortunately, your energy replenishes during combat, but it will drain from using afterburners or rapidly firing repulsor blasts. So you will sometimes need to be a bit conservative in what you do. Your suit also has the ability to auto-repair. This is one of the more sensible progressive health systems, since Iron Man's suit can, in fact, fix itself in the comics. Get pounded hard and your structural integrity weakens. If you can get out of the line of fire for a few seconds, you'll repair the suit and be ready to take more punishment. But should you lose all health, the suit falls to the ground. Fortunately, you are given three "reboots" for each level. So if you are knocked down, you will reboot automatically and continue the fight.

Managing where you direct the suit's power distribution is an important part of battle. Using the D-Pad, you can push the energy focus to weapons, melee, thrusters or life support. The switch is fairly quick, so if you are taking a lot of hits, you can switch to life support, heal fast, then switch back to thrusters to chase down a stray missile before powering up your weapons to blast the target out of the sky. Iron Man is a full throttle game that throws loads of enemies at you from start to finish. You will rarely have a chance to catch your breath.

While most of our experience playing through several levels of Iron Man was positive, the flight control isn't as responsive as we might have hoped. Things are fine above the city skyline, but zipping between buildings is more perilous than perhaps is necessary. And the levels seem fairly short. Judging by how long it took us to get through the first few levels, it seems you could probably beat Iron Man quicker than you could get an oil change. At least you can upgrade multiple aspects of your suit and carry those improvements through to a second playthrough. Fans can also expect several unlockable suits from Iron Man's long history. So while the game may end up being a bit on the short side, there will be some replay value.

Iron Man is a surprisingly promising game. It doesn't attempt to be anything more than an action game, but it does that quite well. Look for it to hit store shelves around May 2, to coincide with the release of the feature film.